Have you ever heard of Coda? Coda is a beautiful Mac editor. I have been using Coda since I bought my Mac Book Pro last December and I am very happy I bought it. I use Adobe Dreamweaver at work but I still prefer Coda. It has got very clean interface. It is not overloaded with menus and buttons. All the necessary functionality is easily accessible from very carefully chosen and designed navigation. They also provide free updates which is very cool so I don’t have to buy new version every time they came with new features. I do all my XHTML, CSS, PHP, SQL and JavaScript coding in it. You can even divide the window into sections so you can see have your PHP code next to your CSS code and browser view. There is nothing like “design view” you might know from Dreamweaver which anyway does not work most of the time, instead they use web kit to render pages inside Coda.
Not for “weekend” designers
I do think that Coda is for professional only. It’s for coders who know syntax and there is absolutely no need for “design view”. I personally think that companies like Adobe should not waste their time trying to develop WYSIWYG. HTML and CSS are not that difficult to learn so people who really want to build sites need to learn them anyway. Weekend designers can just save MS Word document as HTML. I don’t think they will spent time to learn how to use CSS in Dreamweaver anyway.
Coming back to coding
I have seen couple of techniques used for coding CSS or dynamic languages. I would be interested to know how you guys manage your code and what techniques you use.
I try to divide my code into logical files. For example in CSS I have reset, layout, color, typography and IE files. I think that is fine for blog like this but for large sites I would go for 1 style per section plus general file which takes care of header, footer and main layout.
What do you use?
Do you use Snooks practice and put all CSS properties on one line for each selector or the standard method where you create new line for each property? Do you indent your CSS code depending on the HTML structure?
I use the second method for my CSS and I also indent the CSS code. You can see the screenshot bellow. When it comes to HTML I indent code the way that opening bracket and closing bracket are on their own lines where the content itself sits on its own line between them as you can see on the image bellow as well.
